Unit A1What is Translation?

Meltem CAMLIBEL

Q1: Is translation a process or a product?

• The Concise Oxford English Dictionary

Translation:

1) The act or an instance of translating

It relates to translation as a process.It focuses on the role of the translator in taking the original or source text and turning it into a text in another language.

2) A written or spoken expression of the meaning of a word, speech, book, etc. in another language.

It relates to the product. It centers on the concrete translation product produced by the translator.

ROMAN JAKOBSON’S TYPOLOGY

• Intralingual translation

translation within the same language, which can involve rewording or paraphrase.

e.g. Football / soccer & Mummy / mommy

• Interlingual translation

translation from one language to another.

• Intersemiotic translation

translation of the verbal sign by a non verbal sign.

Q2: Can you guess the meanings of these types?

The area of Translation

1. The process of transferring a written text from source language to target language, conducted by a translator, or translators, in a specific socio-cultural context.

2. The written product, or target text,

which results from that process and

which functions in the socio-cultural

context of the target language.

3. The cognitive, linguistic, visual,

cultural and ideological phenomena

which are an integral part of 1 and 2.

Translation Studies

• includes

* equivalence between items in source language and target language

* the notion of translatability

Translation Studies are divided into

• Pure ‘Translation Studies’

encompasses descriptive studies of existing translations and general and partial translation theories

• Applied Studies

covering translator training,translator aids and translation criticism.

The objectives of Pure ‘Translation Studies’

1. To describe the phenomena of translating and translation as they manifest themselves in the world or our experience

2. To establish general principles by means of which these phenomena can be explained and predicted.

General Laws of translation

1. The law of growing standardization- target texts generally display less linguistic variation than source texts

2. The law of interference- common source text lexical and syntactic patterns tend to be copied, creating unusual patterns in the target text.

Map of disciplines interfacing with Translation Studies

HermeneuticsPoststructuralismdeconstruction

SemanticsPragmaticsSocial linguisticsCorpus linguisticsDiscourse analysis

PoeticsRhetoricNarratologyComparative literature

Film studiesHistoryGender studies

TerminologyLexicologymultimedia

TranslationCultural studies

Literary Studies

Linguistics

Philo

soph

y

Language Engineering

Unit A2 Translation Strategies

Form and Content

• Roman Jakobson

‘All cognitive experience and its classification is conveyable in any existing language’

only poetry ‘by definition is untranslatable’ since in verse the form of words contributes to the construction of the meaning of the text.

These statements express a classical dichotomy in translation between

sense/content and form/style.

sense

content

form

style

The sense may be translated while the form often cannot.

The point where form begins to contribute to sense is ‘untranslatability’ (poetry, song and advertising)

To illustrate;

In the published translations of Harry Potter,

translators have resorted to altering the original

name in order to create the required pun:

In French, the name becomes ‘Tom Elvis

Jedusor’ which gives ‘Je suis Voldemort’ as well

as suggesting an enigmatic fate with the use of

the name Elvis and the play on words ‘jeudusor’

or ‘jeu du sort’, meaning ‘game of fate’. In this

way the French translator, Jean- François

Menard, has preserved the content by altering

the form.

Literal and Free

• Free translation

focuses on the content of the target text rather than the form, which means that the same content is.

• Word-for-word translation

preservation of word order and as literal translation as possible of individual words, including cultural words.

• Literal translation

apart from as literal as possible translation of individual words, grammatical structures are converted into the nearest target language equivalents.

TRANSLATIONESE

When a target text is overly close or influenced by the source text or

source language. The result known as ‘translationese’ which is

related to translation universals due to common translation

phenomena such as interference, explicitation and domestication.

Comprehensibility and Translatability

• Translatability

* a relative notion and has to do with the extent to which meaning can still be adequately expressed across languages .

* But, for this to be possible, meaning has to be understood not only in terms of what the source text contains, but also and equally significantly, in terms of such factors as communicative purpose, target audience and purpose of translation.

Q3: Do you think everthing is translatable?

• Jakobson

‘yes, to a certain extent’ as a criterion target text must be comprehensible.

• Some issues are linked to the strategies of literal and free translation, form and content areas such as text type and audience.

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